Rome Diaries: At the San Calisto
The best bar in the world, possibly
“every evening - and most mornings (and some afternoons) - I went to the San Calisto, the best bar in Rome, probably Italy, possibly the world.”
Geoff Dyer
The San Calisto is so unprepossessing that it takes me a little while before I realise I’ve been here before. Or nearly here, anyway. I haven’t actually sat at any of the tables outside the San Calisto but I have walked right past them. Not just on this trip but on my previous visits to Rome too.
It’s right next to Santa Maria in Trastevere after all, one of the oldest and most visited churches in Rome. I have walked down the street past the San Calisto many times but have never really seen it, never acted like it was any different from any other bar on any other street in Rome.
But it’s where I’m aiming for tonight. Others may take a pilgrimage to Santa Maria; I go to the San Calisto. There are many literary sights in Rome. There’s the Keats-Shelley House, where John Keats lay dying of tuberculosis over two centuries ago. There’s the Non-Catholic Cemetery, where Keats spends his time now in a different kind of repose. There’s the English bookshop on Via del Moro, and countless others.
I visit these, of course. I’m no philistine. I like literary sights. But I’ve never read a word of Keats. I go to his house in Rome because it’s the literary thing to do. I’m a writer, and so I visit the writer’s house. Many writers will have made a pilgrimage here and so I do too, even though I haven’t read any Percy Shelley either. Percy Shelley didn’t live or die in the house that bears his name next to the Spanish Steps, but he got himself buried in Rome too.
The morning after my night at the San Calisto, I enter the Non-Catholic Cemetery and stand, looking at a map. A woman who works there asks if I’d like some information. I am violently hungover and don’t want to do any thinking and so I say, sure, any information she has will be great. She takes me into a little office and shows me an even more detailed map and says, “I suppose you are looking for the Romantic poets.”
“Uh huh,” I reply, though this is both true and not. I have schlepped all the way to the cemetery primarily because some famous writers are buried here but also because it’s just meant to be quite nice, quite peaceful. With the hangover I’m nursing anywhere tranquil is fine by me, it might as well be where some dead writers are as well. She points out Keats’ grave, and Shelley’s, and a few other notables I’m too hungover to write down or remember.
I go and sit by Keats’ grave and wish I were down there with him. Not literally, of course, I’m quite happy to be alive, in Rome, with nothing very taxing to do. But I am really quite viciously hungover and so having nothing to do but lie in the Roman sun for eternity - sans hangover - does seem quite appealing.
Why am I so hungover? The San Calisto, of course. As well as the literary pilgrimage I have on my list of things to do in Rome, I also have a little bit of literary stalking on there too. Keats and Shelley are - visibly, thanks to the Non-Catholic Cemetery - quite dead.
So, it doesn’t quite feel as weird to go where they went, sit where they sat. The Keats-Shelley house literally charges me for the privilege of doing so. So many people have done that particular pilgrimage a little industry has formed around it.
But Geoff Dyer is still alive. He is - possibly - my favourite living writer, and he thinks the best bar in the world is - possibly - the San Calisto. Therefore, I must go. But it feels different to be following around a writer who I could still actually follow. It is extremely unlikely Geoff Dyer will be at the San Calisto when I visit, sure, but he could be there. People won’t sell me a ticket to follow in his footsteps while he’s still around making new ones.
Though it’s not just a Geoff Dyer spot. It’s a classic Rome spot, so much so a tour guide recommends it by saying it’s good for meeting people and, on an unrelated note, a beer costs two euros. This last point explains the fact that when I do rock up half of Rome seem to have had the same idea.
I should be prepared for this. I have read Dyer and Dyer says “it wasn’t just that everyone was welcome; everyone was actually there.” I don’t end up sitting in the San Calisto although that’s because you pretty much can’t. There are barely any seats. It does have a terrace, which is fenced in, though most people who are drinking at the San Calisto aren’t actually inside or on the terrace at all, but just stood in the street next to it. The whole road is basically the San Calisto.
It’s two euros and eighty cents for a beer, so a little more expensive than billed but still so cheap I can taste trouble in my first sip. At first I stand around, taking it all in, and then I remember why I don’t go to bars alone when at home.
I don’t have the worn-down, life-beaten gravitas for it, the look of a man who can go for a quiet one, drink away his day, and then finally head off home to sit around the fireplace. But I am on a solo trip and I want to visit the San Calisto and so I am here, alone.
The San Calisto is so jam-packed with people, with Roman life, that being alone here, never mind drinking alone, is particularly galling. The tour guide had said it was good for meeting people but of course, to meet people I must first walk up to strangers, engage them in conversation, not stand sipping my beer by the bins, as I realise I’m doing instead.
Luckily, it’s not hard to spot an Englishman. It never is when abroad. The English are the proverbial sore thumbs when it comes to travel, at least to other Englishmen. Americans are the sore thumbs overall, to the world at large. You don’t need to be able to spot an American at ten paces as you can already hear them at twenty. But to an Englishman like myself, spotting a fellow countryman is easy.
I spot one now, across the terrace. He’s got a friend, sure, but he looks English and, even better, I hear him speaking English. I sip my beer and decide to plunge in.
Many, many hours later I am no longer in the San Calisto. I am in a different bar on a different street, and things begin to sway. The room begins to spin, all by itself. I have had far, far too many two euro beers at the San Calisto with my new friends and now I have reached the stage of drunkenness when, as if by magic, the beers cost eight euros.
I wouldn’t have introduced myself to two strangers at another bar, but the San Calisto, its energy, its reputation for being where everybody in Rome drinks when they want to make some new friends, pushed me on. Perhaps this makes it the best bar in Rome, probably Italy, possibly the world.
The verdict of my new friends and I is mixed. Alex, who is not English, loves the place. But then he spent many, many years as a teenager and twenty-something getting drunk here and so, is rather biased. John, who is English, thinks it is absolutely not the best bar in the world. He looks around, unimpressed, at all the hullaballoo.
I’m torn. As I sit, with new friends and two large beers that cost me just over five euros, it seems like not just the best bar in the world but the best place full stop. Is there anywhere else I would rather be?
The problem with the San Calisto is purely logistical. Even though half of Rome are there at any one time, they just haven’t got the facilities. This is perhaps appropriately Italian but by the facilities I obviously mean the facilities, the loos, the bogs. They have one bog, and a queue not seen since Queen Liz took her leave.
I’m a generous pisser at the best of times, so put quite a few pints, really too many pints, of cheap Italian beer in me and I could power half the fountains in Rome. By the time I reach the one solitary bog my back teeth aren’t so much floating as face down on the floor in need of resuscitation. While in the queue for the lack of facilities the San Calisto is not the best bar in the world.
Not to worry. Eventually, I do reach the bog and soon I am back on the terrace, working on drinking enough beer to wind me right back in the queue, and, eventually, to another bar on another street, where everything will begin to sway. Somewhere with lots of toilets, and very expensive drinks. So, it doesn’t hold a candle to the San Calisto.
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This bar is a friend test. I don’t go on weekends or late in the evening anymore, but is one of Rome’s great treasures